Driverless taxis are to start carrying passengers in Tokyo in 2027. I counted 990 comments: 74 to 26. The top comment came from a man who drives a taxi in central Tokyo for a living, and it said that obeying the road traffic law to the letter is not enough to get through this city, so try the countryside first
74 to 26. The top comment came from a man who drives a Tokyo taxi for a living: he does not oppose the cars, he opposes the place. That one comment took 40 per cent of the vote. Seventy-eight comments said start in the countryside instead, worth 45 per cent of the vote; thirteen defended starting in Tokyo, worth 0.4 per cent. About a hundred presses to one.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1st 3501 ∕ 485 I drive a taxi in Tokyo for a living. I have no objection at all to these being introduced, or to there being more of them. I see the Waymo test cars around the centre often and I know the accuracy is good and they are nimbler than you would expect. Even setting all that aside, I have never understood the insistence on starting in central Tokyo. Start where the drivers are short, especially at night. Nihon Kotsu is adding cars outside the centre too now. Build a record in the regions first. They know perfectly well that the crash that will certainly happen takes a long time to come back from — all the more so when the centre is full of situations that obeying the road traffic law to the letter will not get you through, the comment says
- 2nd 806 ∕ 134 There is plenty still to solve, but this is certainly safer than a car driven by someone in their eighties or nineties. Outside the cities a car is a necessity, and the shortage of public-transport drivers is severe enough that supply is not keeping up with demand. The law should be brought along and the roll-out speeded up, the comment says
- 3rd 504 ∕ 95 This is not a challenge to the technology itself, but how far can the service cope with everything that is not driving. With nobody aboard, what happens with a passenger who leaves something behind, one who falls asleep drunk, one who smokes, one who will not get out, one who is sick in the car, damage to the fittings, a sudden illness. I would like to know how the countries already running these deal with it, the comment says
- 4th 437 ∕ 139 I drive in central Tokyo every day. Plenty of taxi drivers drive badly and plenty have no sense at all, and among the owner-drivers with no company name on the door there are many who think nothing of the speed limit or the traffic rules. I have driven alongside the Waymo cars many times and passed them many times, and the testing seems to have moved on — the fine judgements and the control have come a long way. Starting with a person aboard and widening it as you watch is a good way to do it, the comment says
- 5th 270 ∕ 129 Moving in stages from a crew member riding along is a sound approach and I like it. But the road environment in Tokyo is far more complex than San Francisco and the moment there is nobody aboard, cases nobody planned for will certainly appear. The real bottleneck looks less like the technology than the rules — the approvals, and sorting out who is liable after a crash. A hundred cars is a small number, and a careful start is what I am hoping for, the comment says
I read all 990 top-level comments, as the thread stood at 07:00 on 16 September 2026, twenty-two hours after publication. The thread holds 1,489 comments in all. The buttons came to 8,694 agree, 2,346 that's-informative and 3,037 hmm — 74 to 26. Two earlier threads sit at the same figure, 0038 and 0020; only 0017, at 63 to 37, is lower, and the highest are 0036 and 0045 at 96 to 4. But the 26 here is not a count of people opposing the story. As we will see, this thread barely opposes it at all. The vote is top-heavy: the single top comment took 3,501 presses, 40 per cent of the whole; the top two took 50 per cent, the top five 63 per cent, the top ten 74 per cent, the top twenty 82 per cent. Below that it is quiet. Of the 990 comments, 486 — 49 per cent — never received a single agree; 200, 20 per cent, received no button at all; 425, 43 per cent, received one press or none. In 259 comments, 26 per cent, the hmm count is higher than the agree count. Replies shown against the top-level comments come to 440, of which 172 sit under the top comment. And the biggest subject in this thread is not whether driverless cars are safe. It is where they should go. Comments mentioning the countryside, the regions, depopulated areas or dying villages came to 190, 19 per cent, and took 5,341 presses, 61 per cent of the vote. Of those, 78 said plainly that it should start there rather than in Tokyo, or asked why Tokyo at all — 3,918 presses, 45 per cent. Comments giving a reason why Tokyo is the right place to start came to 13 when I picked them out by hand, worth 39 presses between them, 0.4 per cent of the vote. Six to one in comments written; about a hundred to one in buttons pressed. At the head of those 78 stands the top comment. The writer says he drives a taxi in Tokyo for a living. He opens by saying he has no objection at all to the cars being introduced or to there being more of them, then says he has never understood the insistence on starting in the centre, and that it should be the regions first, especially at night. The last line is that the centre is full of situations that obeying the road traffic law to the letter will not get you through. That comment took 3,501 presses, 40 per cent of the vote, along with the most hmm in the thread at 485 and the most replies at 172. The most pressed comment was also the most pushed-back comment. Twenty-four comments in this thread say the law is not actually obeyed on these streets: the speed limit treated as nothing, bicycles that do not stop, illegal parking as an everyday matter, passengers picked up inside junctions. Between them they took 3,963 presses, 46 per cent of the vote. This is where it gets interesting, because they are looking at the same street and drawing opposite conclusions. Nine of them, worth 448 presses, say that is exactly why the machine should be driving. Fourteen, worth 3,514 presses, say that is exactly why it will not work here, or that the enforcement should come first. One, worth one press, I could not read either way. Same diagnosis, opposite prescription. But 3,501 of those 3,514 presses belong to the top comment alone, so this is a fact about presses on one comment, not about how many people wrote it. Some other counts. Comments touching on liability, damages, insurance, negligence or criminal responsibility came to 95, 10 per cent — and drew 535 presses, 6 per cent. Many people ask; few press. Comments on how badly human taxi drivers drive, or on their age, came to 77 and 1,767 presses, 20 per cent. Narrow streets, illegal parking, bicycles and electric scooters: 91 comments, 1,009 presses, 12 per cent. Vested interests and ride-sharing: 75 comments, 284 presses, 3 per cent. Depending on a foreign company, or wanting a domestic one: 53 comments, 107 presses, 1 per cent. Jobs disappearing: 42 comments, 107 presses, 1 per cent. Mess in the cabin, drunk passengers, people staging collisions: 38 comments, 569 presses, 7 per cent. Comments naming the transport ministry, officialdom, bureaucrats, approvals, regulation or the state of the law came to 62 and 1,416 presses, 16 per cent. Comments mentioning the police came to 19 and 94 presses, 1 per cent. This thread lays the blame for the slowness on the ministry, not on the police. The most pushed-back comment sits at 19th, with 53 agree against 154 hmm and five replies. It asks what happens when an elderly or sick person is lying in the road and will not get up, and an ambulance cannot get through the jam; a driver could move them, but a car that cannot detour or reverse will sit there and make the jam worse, and that should be thought through before any of this starts. Its 154 hmm is the second-largest count in the thread after the top comment's 485. The heaviest push-back by ratio is at 75th, six agree against 44 hmm, arguing that cutting car parks would unlock trillions of yen a year and a local property boom. A word about the expert notes. Yahoo! News Japan prints commentary from named specialists above the reader comments, and this story carries six of them. The most pressed, at 1,345, says that riding one in Shenzhen shows you it is safe, that it stops whenever it is unsure and so gets you there later than a human would, and that it suits the countryside — where the transport is vanishing — better than Tokyo. Out of 990 comments, exactly three mention any of the six. One takes issue with how the economics journalist put it, one says a freelance writer's figures rest on a mistake, and one complains that there are too many notes and that all of them are friendly to driverless cars. The three drew three presses between them. In 0047 it was one comment out of 4,196; in 0046 it was 160. Now to check my own reading against the thread. My reading was that the people calling driverless cars dangerous are the ones already ignoring the road traffic law, complaining because the machine will get in the way of their own comfortable driving. That voice is here. Picking them out by hand, sixteen comments complain precisely because the machine will obey the rules: it will seed traffic jams; a little over the limit is tacitly allowed but a driverless car will keep to it exactly; on a yellow line it cannot pass a bicycle and the queue builds behind; who gets leaned on by the car behind, the passenger; if it will not use the back streets then I do not want it when I am in a hurry. So that is a hit. But those sixteen took 23 presses between them, 0.3 per cent of the vote, and the highest of them sits at 49th. The voice I expected is in the thread, in the corner of it. That everything being driverless would be far safer is also a hit: that is the second comment exactly, with 806 presses, and the comments on bad or elderly human driving come to 77 and 1,767 presses, 20 per cent. That the Japanese police are useless is something this thread cannot settle. Only 19 comments, 94 presses, one per cent, mention the police at all; the blame for the slowness goes to officialdom, 62 comments and 1,416 presses. Unknown. And the wish that they would get on with it is not opposed here either — far from it, more comments say it is too late and Japan is a lap behind. But the answer that came back was not don't, it was not here. Two hits, one unknown, and one answer back from the thread. Nothing of my own words was left out this time.
What happened
At nine in the morning on Tuesday 15 September 2026, Impress Watch published a story on Yahoo! News Japan. The taxi-hailing app GO, Waymo — which belongs to Alphabet in the United States — and Nihon Kotsu have agreed to work together to put driverless taxis on the road in Tokyo as a commercial service.
Here is what the story says. The three companies are aiming to run Japan's first fully driverless commercial taxi service, at what is called autonomous driving level 4, in Tokyo during 2027. Test driving on public roads began in 2025 across seven of Tokyo's wards, with a Nihon Kotsu crew member riding along, and that record is what has moved them on to the next stage. The plan is to build up to a fleet of about a hundred cars during 2027.
The work is split three ways. GO handles the relationships with local taxi operators and the overall design, and offers the service through its own app. Waymo supplies the driving technology, the operating platform and the fleet management, and offers the service through its app as well. Nihon Kotsu, the largest taxi operator in Tokyo, runs the day-to-day operations and the depots. The cars are Jaguar i-PACE electric vehicles carrying the fifth-generation Waymo Driver. On fares, Nihon Kotsu's president Taiji Wakabayashi said the basis would be the existing Japanese taxi fare system.
The press conference is quoted too. Ichiro Kawanabe — chairman of the national taxi association, a director of Nihon Kotsu and chairman of GO — said that taxis began in Japan in 1912, in Yurakucho, and that 2027 is the 115th year, the year a driverless taxi becomes an ordinary taxi that anyone can get into. He rode a Waymo in Phoenix, Arizona in August 2023 and knew at once that this was the future: fewer crashes, an answer to the labour shortage, an answer for places people cannot get around. He added that the transport minister is very positive about driverless cars and that the head of the National Police Agency is involved in amending the road traffic law for them.
Tekedra Mawakana, co-chief executive of Waymo, said the company achieved the world's first driverless run on a public road in 2015 and now provides more than half a million paid rides a week across fifteen American cities, has driven more than 200 million miles fully autonomously, and has cut injury crashes by 94 per cent compared with human drivers. That 94 per cent is what the story reports; I cannot verify it from this one article, so I record only that the story says so.
Kawanabe also said that taxis with human drivers will go on existing alongside the driverless ones — that turnover among drivers runs at just under ten per cent a year, that stopping recruitment would not take the work away from today's drivers, and that new jobs are appearing, such as collecting map data.
A few words for readers outside Japan. Autonomous driving level 4 means the car can drive itself, with nobody in the driver's seat, within a defined area and set of conditions; Japan's amended road traffic law permitting it came into force in 2023. The road traffic law is the statute that sets out the rules of the road here, and this thread refers to it constantly by its short name. Nihon Kotsu is the largest taxi company in Tokyo. Ride-sharing — ordinary people carrying passengers in their own cars — is permitted in Japan only under the management of a taxi company, and the thread brings that up again and again.
What I thought when I read it
This is what I wrote.
In the end, the people who say driverless cars are dangerous are the human cars and the human bicycles that are not obeying the road traffic law, complaining because they cannot drive along in comfort. Everything being driverless would be far safer.
The Japanese police are useless, so illegal parking, speeding and rolling through stop signs are a free-for-all. Everything driverless would be safer. I want them to get on with it.
Nothing was left out this time. There is no abuse of a named person in it, so it stands as written.
There are four claims there. The people calling driverless cars dangerous are the ones already breaking the law, complaining for their own convenience. Everything driverless would be safer. The police do not enforce, so illegal parking, speeding and stop signs are a free-for-all. And get on with it. Whether those four turn up in 990 comments is what I check at the end.
I will say now that the fourth one came back in a shape I did not expect.
74 to 26 — 990 comments, twenty-two hours after publication
I counted at seven in the morning on 16 September, twenty-two hours after the story went up. There are 990 top-level comments; the thread holds 1,489 in all. The buttons came to 8,694 agree, 2,346 that's-informative and 3,037 hmm — 74 to 26.
Two threads I have counted before sit at the same figure, 0038 and 0020. Only 0017, at 63 to 37, is lower; the highest are 0036 and 0045 at 96 to 4. But the 26 here is not a count of people opposing the story. As you will see, this thread barely opposes it. What is being pushed back on is not the story but one point inside it.
The vote is top-heavy. The single top comment took 3,501 presses, 40 per cent of the whole; the top two took 50 per cent, the top five 63 per cent, the top ten 74 per cent, the top twenty 82 per cent. Below that it is quiet: of the 990 comments, 486 — 49 per cent — never received a single agree, 200 — 20 per cent — received no button at all, and 425 — 43 per cent — received one press or none. In 259 comments, 26 per cent, the hmm count beats the agree count. Replies shown against the top-level comments come to 440, of which 172 sit under the top comment.
So read the numbers below in pairs, as always: how many people wrote it, and how many people pressed. This time those two come apart at the most important point.
The argument in this thread is not about safety. It is about place
Before I counted, I assumed the thread would split over whether driverless cars are frightening. It did not.
Comments mentioning the countryside, the regions, depopulated areas or dying villages came to 190 — 19 per cent — and took 5,341 presses, 61 per cent of the vote. Of those, 78 said plainly that it should start there instead of Tokyo, or asked why Tokyo at all: 3,918 presses, 45 per cent.
Comments that give a reason why Tokyo is the right place to start came to 13 when I picked them out by hand. Between them they took 39 presses, 0.4 per cent of the vote. Their reasons are that there are too few users outside the cities for either the learning or the economics to work, that the cars are so expensive the money has to come back from where the demand is, that if it works in the centre the country roads will be easy, and that rural lane markings and signs are so faded a human cannot always read them.
Six to one in comments written; about a hundred to one in buttons pressed. This thread is not against driverless cars. It is against where they are being put.
The top comment came from a serving Tokyo taxi driver, and it says not here
I drive a taxi in Tokyo for a living, and I have no objection at all to these being introduced or to there being more of them. I see the Waymo trials around the centre often, and I know the accuracy is good and that they are nimbler than you would expect. Even allowing for all that, though — and this has been true from the start — I do not understand the insistence on beginning in central Tokyo. Start where the drivers are short, especially at night. Nihon Kotsu is adding cars outside the centre too now. Try it in the regions first and build a record there. They know perfectly well that the crash that is certain to happen takes a long time to come back from. All the more so when the centre is full of situations that obeying the road traffic law to the letter will not get you through.
東京でタクシー運転しております現役ですが、導入してかつ増やす事自体は全然構いません。
Waymoの自動運転実証実験は実際よく都心で見ており、なかなかの精度で意外と機敏なのも承知しております。
ただこれを差し引いて考慮しましても、初期からそうですが… 何故東京で都心で開始する事に固執するのかが分かりません。
まず人手不足の地方で、特に深夜でしょう。
日本交通は今や都心だけで無く地方でも台数を増やしています。まずは「地方で試して実績を積むべき」だと思います。
絶対起きる自動運転の事故は、一度起きると再開に時間がかかることを百も承知のはずです。
都心では道交法厳守だけでは通じないイレギュラーが山のように有るのですから尚更です。3,501 presses, 40 per cent of the vote. It also drew the most hmm in the thread, 485, and the most replies, 172. The most pressed comment was also the most pushed-back comment.
Read that slowly. A man whose job this technology takes away opens by saying he has no objection to it being introduced or expanded. He grants the technology too. The only thing he objects to is the location.
And then that last line: the centre is full of situations that obeying the road traffic law to the letter will not get you through.
Looking at the same street, and arriving at opposite answers
Twenty-four comments in this thread say the law is not actually obeyed on these streets. Between them they took 3,963 presses, 46 per cent of the vote. What they describe is the speed limit treated as nothing, bicycles that do not stop, illegal parking as an everyday matter, passengers picked up and set down inside junctions.
This is the most interesting thing I found. They are looking at the same road, and the conclusion comes out two different ways.
Nine of them, worth 448 presses, say that is exactly why the driving should be left to a machine rather than a person. Fourteen, worth 3,514 presses, say that is exactly why it cannot work here, or that the enforcement should come first. One, worth a single press, I could not read either way.
Same diagnosis, opposite prescription. But 3,501 of those 3,514 presses belong to the top comment alone, so this is a fact about how hard one comment was pressed, not about how many people hold the view.
The comment I shared on X
I drive in central Tokyo every day. Plenty of taxi drivers drive terribly, and plenty have no sense at all; among the owner-drivers with no company name on the door especially, there are many who think nothing of the speed limit or the rest of the traffic rules. I have driven alongside the Waymo cars many times and passed them many times, and the trials seem to have moved on — the fine judgements and the control have come a long way. Starting with a person aboard and widening it as you watch how it goes is a good way to do this.
都心で毎日運転しています。タクシードライバーには酷い運転をする人、常識のないドライバーも多いです。特に会社の名前を背負っていない個人タクシーなどは制限速度などの交通法規も何とも思っていない方も多いです。ウェイモとも何度も並走したりすれ違ったりしましたが実験が進んだのか細かい判断、制御まで含めてかなりレベルが上がってきている印象です。有人から様子を見ながら判断し広めていく考えは良いと思います。Fourth by vote, with 437 agree, 134 that's-informative, 139 hmm and 19 replies. Fourth out of 990.
The thing worth noticing is that this writer and the writer of the top comment both drive in central Tokyo every day. One of them concludes that the machine would be better. The other concludes that the machine should not start here.
Second place says it beats a car driven by someone in their eighties
There is plenty still to solve with driverless cars, but they are certainly safer than a car driven by someone in their eighties or nineties. Outside the cities a car is a necessity, and the shortage of public-transport drivers is bad enough that supply is not keeping up with demand. The law should be brought along and the roll-out speeded up.
自動運転にもまだまだ課題はあると思いますが
それでも80代や90代の高齢者が運転する車よりは
間違いなく安全性は高いでしょう
地方などでは自動車は必需品ですが
公共交通の運転手不足は深刻で需要に供給が追いついていません
法整備などを進めて自動運転車の導入を加速していくべきだと思います806 presses. Across the whole thread, comments on how badly human taxi drivers drive, or on their age, came to 77 and 1,767 presses, 20 per cent of the vote.
The most pushed-back comment asks about the person lying in the road
With a driverless car, the question is what happens when an elderly or sick person is lying in the road and does not get up, the road jams and the ambulance cannot get close. With a driver aboard you could at least move them; a driverless car that cannot detour or reverse will sit there indefinitely, and the jam will only get worse. Cases like that should be thought through properly before any of this begins.
自動運転では、路上に老人や病人が倒れて起きず、道路が渋滞して救急車が近づけない場合にどうするかが問題です。運転士がいれば、それをどかすこともできるでしょうが、自動運転車では、迂回やバックができないのならば、いつまでもその場で立ち往生で、このため、渋滞がますますひどくなるでしょう。このような場合まできちんと考えた上で、自動運転を始めるべきと思います。Nineteenth, with 53 agree against 154 hmm and five replies. Its 154 hmm is the second-largest count in the thread, after the top comment's 485.
The heaviest push-back by ratio sits at 75th: six agree against 44 hmm, for a comment arguing that if driverless cars let Tokyo cut its car parks, the land released would be worth trillions of yen a year and would set off a local property boom.
One subject many people raise and almost nobody presses
Comments touching on liability, damages, insurance, negligence or criminal responsibility came to 95 — 10 per cent, one in ten. Between them they drew 535 presses, 6 per cent of the vote.
Who will be liable is one of the most repeated questions in this thread. The button is barely pressed on it. The same question is written out dozens of times, separately, and each time it ends at zero presses or one.
Some other counts. Narrow streets, illegal parking, bicycles and electric scooters: 91 comments, 1,009 presses, 12 per cent. Vested interests and ride-sharing: 75 comments, 284 presses, 3 per cent. Depending on a foreign company, or wanting a Japanese one: 53 comments, 107 presses, 1 per cent. Jobs disappearing: 42 comments, 107 presses, 1 per cent. Mess in the cabin, drunk passengers, people staging collisions: 38 comments, 569 presses, 7 per cent.
Comments naming the transport ministry, officialdom, bureaucrats, approvals, regulation or the state of the law came to 62 and 1,416 presses, 16 per cent. Comments mentioning the police came to 19 and 94 presses, 1 per cent. This thread lays the blame for the slowness on the ministry, not on the police.
Three comments out of 990 picked up the expert notes
Yahoo! News Japan prints commentary from named specialists above the reader comments, and this story carries six of them. In order of presses: riding one in Shenzhen shows you it is safe, it stops whenever it is unsure and so gets you there later than a human would, and it suits the emptying countryside better than Tokyo (1,345); in West Hollywood enormous numbers of them are on the road every day and the absence of tipping is a real advantage (583); I covered the press conference, the fares will work like an ordinary taxi's, and the co-chief executive said plainly that there will be nobody in the driver's seat from day one for the general public (359); blue-collar drivers should be retraining as soon as they can (208); I hope the testing is careful enough that this becomes something everyone can choose with confidence (148); what matters is not that there is no driver but what value the rider actually gets (127).
Out of 990 comments, exactly three mention any of the six. One takes issue with how the economics journalist put it, one says a freelance writer's figures rest on a mistake, and one complains that there are too many notes and that every one of them is friendly to driverless cars. The three drew three presses between them.
In 0047 it was one comment out of 4,196. In 0046 it was 160. Whether the named commentary at the top of the page gets read at all varies completely from story to story.
Counted but not quoted
Twenty-one comments, 93 presses, one per cent, refer to foreigners or to immigration. Most of them guess at nationality or use it as an accusation, so I record the number and do not quote them. Thirty-six comments, 79 presses, refer to China or to Chinese cities, and the same applies.
Twelve comments, 13 presses, name people who spoke at the press conference. Some of them are abusive, so I record only the number. This site does not print abuse of a named person.
There is also a fair amount of mockery of age, aimed at elderly drivers. All of it is counted and none of it is quoted.
The minority side
Technically I am sure it is fine, but I do wonder whether it can run within the law. Is there a single taxi in Tokyo that fully observes where it is allowed to set down and where stopping is prohibited?
技術的には問題ないけど遵法で運行できるのか疑問です。
都内で降車場所とか駐停車禁止を完全に守ってるタクシーっているのか。672nd. Not one button was pressed on it.
The minority in this thread is the 13 comments that defend starting in Tokyo. Between them they took 39 presses, 0.4 per cent of the vote, against 21 hmm. The highest-placed of the 13 sits at 33rd, so none of them is in the top 32. That one begins by saying he has read the many comments arguing the regions should come first and that he agrees with them — and then explains that the regions have too few users for either the learning or the economics, so a model has to be built in the city first. A comment that says it agrees and then writes the opposite conclusion.
Checking my reading against the thread
I made four claims.
That the people calling driverless cars dangerous are the human cars and bicycles already ignoring the road traffic law, complaining because they cannot drive along in comfort — that voice is here. Picking them out by hand, sixteen comments object precisely because the machine will obey the rules. It will seed jams. A little over the limit is tacitly allowed, but a driverless car will keep to it exactly. On a yellow line it cannot pass a bicycle and the queue builds up behind. Who is it that gets leaned on by the car behind — the passenger? If it will not use the back streets, I do not want it when I am in a hurry. A hit.
But those sixteen took 23 presses between them, 0.3 per cent of the vote, and the highest of them sits at 49th. The precise finding is that the voice I described is in this thread, in the corner of it.
That everything driverless would be far safer is a hit. That is the second comment exactly, at 806 presses, and comments on bad or elderly human driving come to 77 and 1,767 presses, 20 per cent of the vote.
That the Japanese police are useless is something this thread cannot settle. Only 19 comments and 94 presses, one per cent, mention the police at all. The blame for the slowness goes to officialdom instead: 62 comments, 1,416 presses, 16 per cent. Unknown.
And the wish that they would get on with it is not opposed here either. Far from it — more comments say the opposite, that this is far too late and that Japan is a lap behind. But the answer that came back was not don't. It was not here. Seventy-eight comments and 3,918 presses, 45 per cent of the vote, say start in the regions rather than Tokyo.
Two hits, one unknown, and one answer back from the thread.
One last thing, the part I sat with longest. The top comment says that obeying the road traffic law to the letter will not get you through central Tokyo. He and I are looking at the same thing. That there is a road out there where the law is not kept — on that, the two of us agree completely.
Where we part is what follows. One of us says: so give it to the machine. The other says: so keep the machine out of here.
The buttons in this thread went heavily to the second. Though nearly all of them landed on a single comment.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.